What if We Get It Right

Metadata

• Author: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
• Full Title: What if We Get It Right?
• Tags: #planet #futurism

Highlights

• It’s not about the glory. It’s about the ripples. (View Highlight)
• The Earth system is incredibly complex. The reason we have deserts where they are is that the air that has risen from the tropics has shed all of its water, and now it’s coming down to rest on the deserts. Then prevailing winds bring dust from the Sahara Desert to fertilize the Amazon. You don’t have deserts without tropical rainforests. And you don’t have rainforests without deserts. (View Highlight)
• We have put so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it weighs more than all the animals and plants on the Earth. It weighs more than everything we have ever built (View Highlight)
• Our job is to generate the most objective science possible, to make our research relevant to more people than we have so far succeeded in making it relevant to, and to frame a lot of research explicitly around solutions. I would also love to see more engagement with possible futures. (View Highlight)
• Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor, plus industrial fluorinated gases such as hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride. (View Highlight)
• Approximately 1 million species are at risk of extinction due to habitat loss, exploitation, climate change, pesticides, and pollution. (View Highlight)
• Up to 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide (a gigaton!) are released from degraded and destroyed coastal ecosystems every year. (View Highlight)
• Despite technological advancements, farming productivity is 21% lower now than it was in the 1960s, due to the effects of climate change on weather patterns. (View Highlight)
• Reducing greenhouse gas pollution, ecosystem degradation, and biodiversity loss and restoring land could have an estimated $140 trillion of benefit annually—a third more than the entire 2023 global GDP. (View Highlight)
• We don’t even know how many species there are on Earth (almost every time a submarine descends to the depths of the ocean, new species are discovered), but scientists estimate there are 8.7 million (±1.3 million). (View Highlight)
• What is nature doing? What are the processes that bring a given ecosystem into health, that support the synergies among different species? Because one overarching perspective that’s been missing from the conversation about climate is the role that functioning, healthy ecosystems play in climate regulation. (View Highlight)
• Albedo is a measure of how reflective a surface is. Ice has a high albedo and dark plants (and soils and rocks) have a low albedo and absorb more heat. (View Highlight)
• A simple example is how healthy soil, with plants and roots and soil-dwelling critters, has carbon in it.*31That organic matter creates a sponge-like aspect that absorbs water. But when the soil is not healthy, you get a situation like we saw in California in 2023, which was in a severe drought, then got a lot of very wet weather that led to massive flooding. (View Highlight)
• Basically what we need is life: life to transport water and, by extension, to regulate heat; life to seed the rain; life to slow down moving water so that it has a chance to infiltrate. (View Highlight)
• In the small water cycle, water falls down as rain, is held in the ground, and helps to grow plants. Plants release moisture through a process called transpiration, which is the upward movement of water through plants—from roots up to the leaves and out through leaf pores called stomata. And that moisture evaporates up into the atmosphere and, ultimately, it condenses and comes down as precipitation again. In some healthy ecosystems and areas like the Amazon rainforest, a raindrop may have five or six cycles of staying in the same area before ultimately it moves to another area. This evapotranspiration is a cooling process.*32 (View Highlight)
• One thing that really struck me is Neal’s definition of a desert. We tend to think that there’s a certain threshold of rainfall that if you get less than that it’s a desert, and if you get more than that, it’s not. The way Neal defines it is that “a desert is a place where when it rains, it floods.” (View Highlight)
• One thing that would be different if we get it right is that we would all be more place-based so that no matter where we are, we are growing the food that is appropriate for that ecosystem—certain fruits and plants in dry areas, and different ones in moist and cooler areas. That is bioregionalism. (View Highlight)
• ecological forestry. First, you cut on long rotations. You leave the trees to grow for a nice long time so that you get the ecological values of a mature forest. One hundred and twenty, one hundred and forty years, something like that. Then, when you finally harvest that timber, you more or less mimic natural disturbance patterns, like how a storm might knock down a tree or patch of trees. (View Highlight)
• We would re-localize and re-regionalize our food production. Not all of it, but significant parts of it. In particular, fruits and vegetables could be grown closer to where people live. (View Highlight)

New highlights added January 21, 2025 at 12:25 AM

• Seeds can also be metaphors. Our ancestral grandmothers in West Africa were surrounded by war, kidnapping, enslavement—and finally were forced into these transatlantic slave ships with no report-backs. And amidst this chaos and this horror they somehow found the audacity to gather up the seeds they’d been saving for generations—their okra, molokhia, Levant cotton, black rice, melon, Amara kale, basil—and braided these seeds into their hair as insurance, because they believed against odds in a future on soil. (View Highlight)
• When I’m faced with hopeless, challenging situations and all that we’re up against, I call into mind this powerful story because if these ancestors, facing horrors I can’t imagine, still had the hope to carry seeds, then I sure as hell better not give up on my descendants. (View Highlight)
• Farmworkers, arguably one of the most important professions in the world, are not protected under the Fair Labor Standards Act or the National Labor Relations Act. They don’t have a right to overtime pay, to a day off in seven, to collective bargaining, to protections against wage theft or child labor. (View Highlight)
• The food system is not based on taking care of people or taking care of the Earth. It’s based on extracting a profit for the owners. (View Highlight)
• Food is a liberatory tool. We’re not dependent on a system that’s designed to kill us or extract from us. (View Highlight)
• I love that, because we’ve sort of vilified carbon, but carbon is the building block of all life. It’s just in the wrong place. It’s in the atmosphere as methane and CO2, causing the greenhouse effect. We need it in the soil and in the bodies of living things. (View Highlight)
• We think about change in terms of this butterfly of transformative social justice. This butterfly has four winglets—butterflies cannot fly with one, two, or three; they need all four.
  One of the winglets is “Resist.” This is directly confronting oppression. That’s the blockades, the strikes, the protests, the boycotts. That’s necessary. We need to get in the face of oppression. You will not put this pipeline through my community; I will chain myself to it.
  Another winglet is “Reform.” This has to do with policy change, getting inside of our institutions and changing the narrative; making change from the inside. This is a lot of the slow, painful bureaucratic work.
  And then we have the winglet that I situate myself on. That’s “Building.” Building alternative institutions that try to model our higher values. The freedom schools and co-ops and land trusts and community farms and free libraries.
  Ayana: The seed banks.
  Leah: Yes, exactly. And the final winglet is “Heal.” Because there’s no way we can go through 500 years of this BS and not be completely traumatized. We need art and therapy and ritual and spirituality and collective healing. And we need every farm to sign up to be food justice certified for workers’ rights. (View Highlight)
• And a lot more of us need to get literate again in the language of the Earth. (View Highlight)
• If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled, or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned, or removed from production.
  —Pete Seeger (View Highlight)
• Development in hazardous flood-prone areas has increased by 122% globally since 1985, outpacing the growth in flood-safe areas. (View Highlight)
• Nature-based solutions received only 0.3% of overall spending on urban infrastructure, despite costing on average 50% less than gray infrastructure alternatives. (View Highlight)
• Building with wood instead of concrete and steel could reduce associated fossil fuel consumption by up to 19%, and carbon emissions by up to 31%. (View Highlight)
• High-speed rail is 3 times faster and 4 times more energy-efficient than driving, nearly 9 times more energy-efficient than flying, and can reduce emissions by up to 90% when powered by clean electricity. (View Highlight)
• This word “resilience,” just like “sustainability,” everyone gets tired of it. But it’s important to recognize that resilience is just culture. Culture is the habits, tendencies, patterns, and routines that we collectively share; it’s the consequence of persistent circumstance and prevailing conditions. It’s crucial that we design and create spaces where culture can thrive. (View Highlight)
• When you think about this needed societal transformation around climate, what’s holding us back?
  Paola: I think it’s unmoored capitalism. The pursuit of shareholders’ interests is what’s holding us back, and all the backchanneling and politics that go with it. As human beings and as citizens I think we’re ready, but we’re held back by ideology and by an idea of society that is unsustainable. (View Highlight)
• Consumerism is less of a problem because it can be redirected. There are other ways to entertain our instincts of hoarding, collecting, showing, having new things, because that’s what consumerism also is. It is a way to express ourselves, but we were taught that to express ourselves, we should buy.
  We can still have different types of “shopping therapies.” We can still go on a shopping spree of upcycled clothes or have wonderful clothes swaps like the ones I used to have with my girlfriends in Milan. We can completely redirect that energy. Instead, the basic goals right now are producing more and moving value around. It’s a perverted system. (View Highlight)
• It’s about being more vocal and pushing for better solutions, pushing legislators and companies to leave behind excessive materials and misguided solutions. (View Highlight)
• Italy recycles 51% of the waste it collects, the most of any European country. The U.S. recycles around 32%, and the global average is nearly 20%. (View Highlight)
• E.O. Wilson:

  The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. (View Highlight)

New highlights added January 25, 2025 at 2:27 PM

• Ayana: What is the nerdiest, least sexy, most esoteric thing we need to do now in order to make this good vision of AI possible?
  Mustafa: I think we have to get comfortable collecting data and making sense of data. In your work with oceans, in order to know if an ocean is being overfished or if coral is being bleached faster than it was twenty years ago, or if there’s suddenly some outbreak of marine disease or there’s suddenly some new impact of ocean mining, or you want to be able to monitor whether some shipping lane is upsetting a bunch of whales, all of that requires data, right? Everything has to be monitored and tracked and you have to learn patterns in that data in order to be able to predict what the likely consequences are going to be of an acceleration in those trends. In that sense, the nerdy answer is that more people need to be data scientists in order to make use of that information and try to do good with it. (View Highlight)

New highlights added February 15, 2025 at 11:23 AM

• Climate change could cause $38 trillion in global economic damages every year by 2050. (View Highlight)
• But truthfully, I don’t think that there is any scenario where we don’t have to march in the streets. One of the things that makes me quite happy and hopeful is that we’re seeing a large, new population of people come into this fight. I got tired of hearing people say that it was up to the next generation to deal with this. It’s true that young people have indeed done most of the leading on this fight—from divestment to the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal to Greta Thunberg and the thousands of young activists all over the Earth. But young people lack the structural power by themselves to make these changes. So it’s been gratifying to see older people at places like Third Act joining in this fight. Our conventional wisdom is that older people become more conservative as they age.[*92|*92] But we cannot let that be the case here. (View Highlight)
• But when people walked around the farmers market, they were having 10 times more conversations. Not 10% more; 10 times more, an order of magnitude more. The economy as we’ve built it over these last decades has encouraged us to forget that we are socially evolved primates. It wasn’t that long ago that we were sitting on the floor of the savannah picking lice out of each other’s fur. It’s no wonder that we like farmers markets. One hopes that a hundred years from now, the fever that we’re living in will have passed. The fever that’s raising the temperature of the planet, but also the fever of consumption that we’ve been living with, replaced by a more natural and more human set of connections to the people around us. (View Highlight)
• In 2022, handouts for fossil fuel corporations hit $1.3 trillion globally—the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion in profits. How about we subsidize the good stuff instead of the bad stuff? Good stuff can include: first-mover incentives, training for climate jobs, community solar, the American Climate Corps…the list is pretty much endless. (View Highlight)
• The idea of green capitalism, for example, takes the capitalist system and adds a set of rules and regulations that price in negative environmental externalities (like greenhouse gas emissions). For example, adding disclosure rules for publicly traded companies, so that investors can make better decisions based on the risks associated with CO2 emissions. (View Highlight)
• Also, it does seem people are less willing to take risks on climate stuff than they are on tech or other sorts of investing. That worries me. We need not just more leaders, but also, across the board, more courage. (View Highlight)
• It all disturbs me, but my best and highest use is to make sure these entrepreneurs and technologies are ready for prime time when the world calls for them to be deployed at trillion-dollar scale, when the political moment hits. (View Highlight)
• Well, right now everybody has their request. Some folks want to make sure that everything we do is done with union labor. Others want to make sure that everything has a direct benefit to justice communities. Others want to make sure everything is sourced from American manufacturers.[*110|*110] I’m happy to deal with all of these asks. But at some point we have to move faster. At that point, I’m hoping that some of these things will have become an integral part of the fabric, so people aren’t jettisoning those concerns, because we know how to do these things and still move fast. (View Highlight)
• Two, we can’t solve all the problems at the federal-government level. Most of the problems we have are local problems. Only 4% of rooftops in this country are filled with solar panels. Australia has 30%. The reason we don’t is because local towns and cities make it impossible to put solar on your roof. And we don’t recycle like Sweden does, for example, because waste management is regulated at the local level. We can’t solve that from the federal-government level, but you can solve it as an activist in your community. (View Highlight)
• Corporate TV news (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) spent only 17 hours covering climate change in the entirety of 2023, across 435 news segments—less than 1% of overall news programming. (View Highlight)
• How do we weave compelling narratives about this highest-stakes drama playing out on the planet? Here are a few hints from polling across twenty-three countries that was led by the nonprofit Potential Energy: (1) people don’t like bans (e.g., of gas stoves)—instead focus on upgrading to clean technologies; (2) “fear versus hope is the wrong debate” because love for the next generation is far and away the most popular reason for climate action; and (3) the narrative “later is too late” outperformed all alternative messages, including creating jobs, improving health, fighting injustice, and preventing extreme weather. This is helpful orientation as we consider: What stories, whose stories do we tell? How do we shift the zeitgeist to make climate pollution untenable and climate solutions the status quo? (View Highlight)
• Make sure that the person reading it wants to turn the page to find out what happens next, and make sure that when they’re done, they’re a little bit sad that they can’t spend more time in that world with those characters. (View Highlight)
• “The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.” That has been the primary organizing principle of my work for the last decade, as it seems like we’re more and more governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies. (View Highlight)
• So, leaning into possibility becomes ever more critical. Not hope or optimism or pessimism, not utopia or dystopia, but what is possible? How can we help each other see that, find our roles in it, lean into it, be a part of solutions? I find it frustrating to see climate stories often presented as this binary, as we either succeed or fail. Because it does matter if we get it 80% right versus if we get it 10% right. Hundreds of millions of lives hang in the balance. (View Highlight)
• Despite climate being the greatest threat to life on Earth in 65 million years, since the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs, it got a combined 23 hours of coverage from major networks in the U.S. over the course of that entire year. (View Highlight)
• Kendra: If I were in charge of newsrooms, I would make sure our journalism was helping people understand how to be participants in a democracy. That’s a niche that local news used to fill. They would tell you when your community board meetings were happening, they would tell you when your school-board elections were happening, they would even tell you how to run for school board. And I think that type of journalism is as important as the deep investigative pieces that highlight the problems. (View Highlight)
• There’s a ton of data that when you lose a newsroom in a community, government corruption goes up, there are all sorts of downwind effects. (View Highlight)
• Kendra: I ended up digging into the journalism literature and learning about this idea that’s been around since at least the 1980s called the “protest paradigm.” Essentially, the idea is that, overall, news as an industry is very conservative and very regressive around the idea of protest. So in many cases, when they report on a protest, they will report on the negative consequences of that protest, like the way it stalled traffic. For example, in 2022, the workers at Kellogg’s went on strike. And so much of the news coverage was focused on what brands of cereal you wouldn’t have access to and not actually why people were going on strike. (View Highlight)
• In places like New York, where flooding is going to be a growing issue, there’s going to be more vegetation, more bioswales, more green spaces, because you’re going to need something to soak that all up. Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot is that the thing that can determine whether or not your neighborhood floods is whether or not the street gutters are cleared out. And I have a feeling that in the future there are going to be more community groups for stuff like that. (View Highlight)
• But most of all, I think about it a lot because I want to stop thinking about it. I don’t want that moment to define me. I don’t want the best to be in the past. I see people being able to organize themselves in a week in Germany to stop expansion of a coal mine. They organize themselves so quickly. They get on a train, they show up, they support each other. And we can’t do that in the United States because we don’t have the infrastructure to do that, the networks to do that. That’s what makes me not want to dwell on what we were able to achieve in the past, but think and strategize about how we can replicate that strength now. (View Highlight)
• I’m fighting for the ability to see my friends fifty years from now and to know that, I’m quoting Xiye here, the people I will love one hundred years from now will have access to the fundamental things that make us human, which is clean air, water, soil.
  Ayana: Xiye, what are you fighting for?
  Xiye: I’m fighting for the wetland in my hometown in Mexico to be clean, for the river that my dad used to bathe in to be clean. I’m fighting for having answers when my kids ask me, “What did you do?” I’m fighting for our generation to have a legacy we’re proud of. I’m fighting to fix the severed connection of humans and Mother Earth. And I’m fighting to feel like the world is not on my shoulders because we all share that responsibility to care together. (View Highlight)
• What if we approach the climate crisis with the moral clarity of children? Some things are simply right and some things are simply wrong.
  It is right to steward life and justice on this magnificent planet. It is right to quickly transition to renewable energy. It is right to protect and restore habitats and species. It is right to hold corporations accountable. It is right to ensure a just transition, leaving no one behind. And it is right to enact strong government policies that will accelerate all of this.
  On the other hand, it is wrong to make this magnificent planet unlivable. It is wrong for the corporations that got us into this mess to continue to profit while they set the world on fire. It is wrong to drive one million species extinct by changing the climate, destroying habitats, and dousing the planet with pesticides. It is wrong to create hundreds of millions of climate migrants and then close our borders when they seek shelter on our shores. It is wrong to force the most marginalized and vulnerable to bear the heaviest climate impacts—from surging seas, to raging fires, to pummeling storms, to enduring droughts, to frequent floods, to unbearable heat. (View Highlight)

New highlights added February 27, 2025 at 9:08 PM

• The ocean is an extremely big deal. And we’ve pummeled it. Polluted it. Dragged it. Emptied it. Disrespected it six ways to Sunday. And yet. Here it still is. Still nurturing, feeding, and delighting us. Still sustaining coastal communities and buffering the impacts of climate change. (View Highlight)
• Politicians are often compelled by “How will this affect my constituents? How many jobs is this going to create (in my district)? Is this popular?” (View Highlight)
• • The Blue Economy (tourism and recreation, fishing, shipping, and more) supports 3.5 million jobs in the U.S.—considerably more than all the jobs in crop production, telecommunication, and building construction combined.
  • 65% of fishermen believe that climate change could leave them “unable to profit” and ultimately “forced out” of their fishery. (View Highlight)
• Write it down. As the saying goes, talk is cheap. The memos and the op-eds and the reports—that’s what starts to make it real. The pen is indeed mighty. (View Highlight)
• • Team up. Join forces with other organizations, with people you actually enjoy, with people across the country with different areas of expertise. Change can be accelerated through deep and broad collaborations. Also: Make friends with staffers in Congress and in the administration.
  • Tell a compelling story. Make your case—publicly and privately, in the press and on the internet. The message and the messengers both matter. Make it catchy; make it stick.
  • Don’t quit on big ideas. No matter who is in office, keep pushing. Relentlessly, assiduously pursue change from every angle, at every opportunity. Pry open windows of opportunity. (View Highlight)

New highlights added March 10, 2025 at 3:53 PM

• If we funded our government agencies and accepted as a society that we wanted our laws to be enforced as they were written, really in keeping with their spirit, it would be a dramatically different world. And most of all, if we decided to resource that enforcement equitably so that you didn’t have a different standard for a White, wealthy community as opposed to a low-income community of color, it would be night and day. We wouldn’t have a Cancer Alley in Louisiana.[*174|*174] We wouldn’t have a chemical corridor through the Ohio River Valley. (View Highlight)
• Disaster Researchers for Justice. (View Highlight)
• After all, what is hope? The dictionary definitions of “hope” and “optimism” both include the expectation of a positive outcome. A positive outcome is a wild thing to expect given the scenarios we face. But the definition of “hope” also includes the word “desire,” something I have in abundance. I want climate solutions so badly. And while it would be foolish to assume that our story on this planet has a happy ending, every day I wake up, and I think more and more of us wake up, and consider what we can do to manifest that desire, to nudge ourselves closer to a healthy and safe and restored and resplendent life on Earth. (View Highlight)
• As philosopher Joanna Macy has put it:

  It’s okay not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out. So just be present…And when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. (View Highlight)

• Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the Earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal…To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. (View Highlight)

• On the majesty of turquoise seas, and fireflies, and aspen trees,

  On the honor of our parents, our ancestors, and humans-to-come,

  On the wonders of laughter and sunshine,

  I make these devotions to climate solutions for my community and for our magnificent planet:
  First, move from “I” to “we.”
  We will expand our sense of interdependence.
  We will rein in our sense of individualism.
  We will ask, “What should we do, together?”
  Survival is collective, our fates are intertwined. (View Highlight)

• Second, do no harm.
  We will restore and heal, not pollute and deplete.
  We will regenerate ecosystems and our own resolve.
  We will live lightly, as part of the Earth.
  Accountability, generosity, and sweetness.
  Third, less is more.
  We will expand our creativity and contract our consumerism.
  We will conserve, and distinguish between needing and wanting.
  We will be gentle with our own imperfections and others’.
  There is such a thing as enough. Basta.[*199|*199]
  Possibility exists.
  This is a world of our making.
  We can remake it, remix it, restore it, rebalance it.
  The path of least resistance is only one of many paths.
  I will be part of getting it right.
  We will be part of getting it right. (View Highlight)